Using Calibre Portable, and the latest Goodreads plugin, it works as expected.
This gives me a workaround, but it would be good to figure out what's broken with my main calibre program.

Calibre portable at 0.9.44
Main Calibre is latest edition: 2.85.1

Quote:

Originally Posted by anthony.burton4

OK - I'd turned the firewall off, but for some reason this wasn't enough. Uninstalling the firewall fixed the problem.

At first glance that would suggest your firewall was permitting <wherever>\Calibre Portable\Calibre\calibre.exe to access The Internet, but it was blocking C:\Program Files\Calibre2\calibre.exe from doing the same.

But given version gap between the two (pre August 2013 and May 2017) it could be something entirely different. Suggest you install latest calibre portable, you can have different versions of portable installed should you need to retain the existing version 0.9.44.

Probably not. The metadata source plugins are limited in what they can update. They can only update a set of core metadata attributes and can't touch the custom columns. I suspect what you would want is to put the original title into a separate column and that isn't possible.

I have a feature request: Would it be possible to retrieve and store the "Original Title" value?

This is possible. "Original Title" can be saved in comment and later (as second step) copied/moved to custom column.
This idea is used in LubimyCzytac plugin.
Plugin for copying/moving data from comment (METAmover) is in same thread (post #3).

METAmover wrote for myself and for Polish users, but after minor modifications, it can be adapted to multilingualism and multipluginity. We can set an international standard for storing and reading data from comments – then this option will also be available in other metadata source plugins.

Seems like Goodreads plugin uses HTTP when downloading metadata. As a HTTPS version of the Goodreads website is available, it would probably make sense to use this to download metadata, and limits nosy governments from knowing what I read.

Is it possible to add contributors for calibre's author fields? A lot of anthologies entered into goodreads list contributing authors as just "contributor" but the goodreads metadata plugin doesn't catch it for the author fields.

Is it possible to add contributors for calibre's author fields? A lot of anthologies entered into goodreads list contributing authors as just "contributor" but the goodreads metadata plugin doesn't catch it for the author fields.

It's possible, but I'd need to look at it. Can you give me some examples to look at? Can there be more than one type of contributor? And if so, should they all be treated the same?

Um, I just had a look, and the plugin already does this. But, you need to enable it in the plugins configuration. If you open the plugins configuration, at the bottom is an option "Get all contributing authors...". Select that, save the change and in the future, all the contributors will be added. I only tested with the last book in your example, but I've no reason to think it won't work on others.

1. A while back I noticed that goodreads.com has a really cool feature in their search ... it allows to search for asins (amazon ids) and isbn's too. It's very accurate, and best of all it's an ajax/json response type deal.

2. Because most of the books I own come from amazon, I have an amazon identifier for them.

Putting 1 and 2 together, I thought I could make the goodreads plugin that much more accurate by having it use amazon_ids to get the equivalent id for goodreads.

If anyone is interested in this version of the goodreads source plugin, it is available here: https://github.com/botmtl/GoodreadsSourcePlugin. The order by which the plugin considers identifiers to make a goodreads match is controlled in the preferences. By default, it's ['goodreads', 'isbn', 'amazon'], meaning that books with a goodreads_id will use that first to update the metadata, and if they don't have one, will try isbn and then amazon (asins). For myself, because I want to match the books over amazon ids if at all possible, I changed this setting to ['amazon', 'goodreads', 'isbn'], giving amazon_ids priority over any other ids.

If the author for this plugin is interested in integrating those changes in the plugin, you are welcomed to do so. The diff between the versions can be seen here: Diff.

If the author for this plugin is interested in integrating those changes in the plugin, you are welcomed to do so. The diff between the versions can be seen here: Diff.

I'd love it if this was added to the original plug-in as an option. All my books are either from Amazon or have been given an ASIN to trick my Kindle and Goodreads into thinking it's from Amazon.

I installed Botmtl's version and it works great for grabbing the metadata from Goodreads, I no longer have to give each of my books a Goodreads ID before I grab the metadata to be sure I get it from the right edition.

But it doesn't read my heavily modified goodreads.json so in Configure download metadata > Configure selected source only the 50 or so default tag mapping are there rather than the ~300 that show up when the original is installed.

Ok Played with it a bit more and it turns out it wont save any new Shelf to Tag mappings, you can enter a new set and save and it'll work up until you close Calibre then it loses all the new mappings. So it seems like it's not reading or writing to the goodreads.json

Windows 10 Pro 64bit
Calibre Portable 3.6.0

Last edited by Penny_Dreadful; 08-06-2017 at 10:36 PM.
Reason: Added more information

Ok Played with it a bit more and it turns out it wont save any new Shelf to Tag mappings, you can enter a new set and save and it'll work up until you close Calibre then it loses all the new mappings. So it seems like it's not reading or writing to the goodreads.json

Sorry about that, I was sure the plugin changes were solid but I didn't pay enough attention to the config side. It's fixed now. My section of the configuration is now saved in another file entirely - it's safer for people just wanting to try out the changes if I don't mess at all with the plugin's existing config file at all.

I also saw that downloading through github is problematic because the download zip function doesn't create a valid plugin (the base folder has to be removed), so I'll just put up this link instead: goodreads.zip